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ENGAGE!
- Steph Turner
- Mar 17, 2024
- 9 min read
Updated: Jul 11, 2024
Sometimes responding to overlooked needs requires some brave souls to stand up and speak truth to power. They must engage reluctant authorities. Resolving overlooked needs can require some brave leaders to transform the status quo. They must engage systems much larger than themselves. Sometimes we live in a time of overwhelming challenges that inspirational leaders recognize as untapped opportunities. That time is now! The most engaging leader can inspire transformational change that brings out the best in us all. Let's find them and support them. We must ENGAGE them!
Which would you expect to create better results?
Challenging powerholders with their biased adversarial process.
OR
Engaging powerholders with our mutually beneficial process.
Mutually respect each other's needs.
Resolve more needs than them.
Transform social structural norms..
CONTENTS
ENGAGE!
Let's outperform each other. Instead of reaching for the minimal standard to mutually respecting each other's unchosen needs, we dare you to go further and try to address more of those needs. We dare you to improve your responsive reputation or earned legitimacy by helping to resolve more needs on all sides. We dare you to empirically contribute to measurable wellness outcomes of improved lifestyles, reduced addictions, and greater life satisfaction. Engage!
1. Assess powerholders with a wellness campaign.
Those in positions of power need impact data. Instead of responding to their biased surveys, the wellness campaign takes the lead to pose its own questions. In the process, the needs on all sides can resolve more readily.
The campaign could announce to those in power, "You don't have to tell us, powerholder, we'll tell you!"
A wellness campaign naturally
assesses
how responsive powerholders are to their vulnerable needs. Then continually
evaluates
powerholder trustworthiness. The wellness campaign carefully
calculates
how powerholders impact those under their influence, if for the good of all.
The better the produced outcomes, the more legitimacy the powerholder earns. The worse the outcomes, the less legitimacy earned. It's all about leveling the distorting effects or power relations.
The whole point of a wellness campaign is to even the playing field in power differentials. Despite ethical standards intended to prevent those in power from negatively impacting the relatively powerless, research points to the need for much improvement. Without something like this leveling process, powerful AI tend to coerce vulnerable RI in ways often hindering resolution of needs. The wellness of us all then suffers.
Need-response recognizes the powerholder as the AI and the powerless as the RI:
AI: Ascribed Impactor prior to participation; Acknowledged Impactor after participating. The Impactor impacts the relationship more than impacted by it.
RI: Reporting Impactee prior to participation; Recognized Impactee after participating. The Impactee is impacted by the relationship more than impacting it.
Anankelogy recognizes all natural needs sit equal before nature, so neither side's needs are prioritized at the expense of the other. Each side can assess the other's responsiveness.
2. Incentivize greater responsiveness.
We live under a dark cloud of avoidant adversarialism that disincentivizes responsiveness to needs.
Avoidant adversarialism: Opposing anyone and anything in the hopes that reasoning will somehow lead to fixing problems, so that we don't have to deal with the uncomfortable messy details.
Powerholders don't know what they don't know. And will never know what they need to know to be effective leaders, while trapped in the norms of avoidant adversarialism.
Most reporting avenues available to the affected powerless rarely if ever result in resolving the needs of all involved. Politics and the judiciary are inherently adversarial. We expect laws to fix our problems. But our laws do not resolve needs; people do.
Need-response presents a wellness campaign as the answer to this need for greater responsiveness to the needs overlooked by adversarial systems. Then complements or dares to compete with such unresponsive systems.
A wellness campaign could be the closest thing we have to watch the watchers. Along the way, it unearths structural barriers to resolving our needs. These are ambitious goals for an untested vision. We must start humbly, trying something that could deliver.
For now, need-response is developing three areas of service for those in need better responsiveness from those in positions of authority. The relatively powerless can initiate a wellness campaign to address:
Unresponsive managers to their workplace needs.
Unresponsive judicial system to exonerating the innocent.
Unresponsive political leaders to public needs amidst polarization.
Each wellness campaign can be labelled according to the responsiveness they seek.
Responsive supervision. Improving productivity by identifying how each worker is best motivated.
Responsive exoneration: Identifying and clearing the countless wrongly convicted innocent.
Responsive depolarization: Converting the challenge of political polarization to opportunities to relate better to each other's different natural priority of needs.
Other areas of service may emerge over time. Such as incentivizing the powers that be to alleviate medical debt, alleviate student debt, serve justice needs of violence survivors, address mental health crises outside of the judicial system, safeguard whistleblowers, preserve journalistic integrity from coercive corporate control, and the like.
A wellness campaign exists to give the option to needy individuals to safely speak their truth to power. And to provide vital impact data to leaders who need to make better decisions. A wellness campaign incentivizes the powerless and powerholder to serve each other's needs.
3. Speak truth to power, listen to those impacted.
The relatively powerless share the need to SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER to report powerholder's negative impact on their unchosen needs.
Such powerholders share the need to LISTEN TO THOSE IMPACTED for impact data to make better executive decisions.
Adversarialism—the rush to take sides in a dispute instead of addressing the unchosen needs driving the differences—stands in the way. Need-response bridges this socially constructed chasm to connect powerholder and the powerless to more effectively communicate their needs to each other.
4. Assess and be assessed.
After alerting the AI powerholder with a notification or an invitation to participate, the need-response process starts assessing each other's responsiveness to each other's needs.
Mutual assessment: After a contacted AI powerholder replies, they are invited to assess the campaign leader's responsiveness. Who then assesses the AI's responsiveness to any identified needs they impact.
Unilateral assessment: If the contact AI powerholder fails to reply in a timely manner, the campaign leader initiates a one-sided assessment of that AI's responsiveness. Not only to any identified needs they impact, but also their unresponsiveness to the initial alert of this process.
These assessments occur as one element in a supportive need-response cycle.
The full process cycles through these four steps, then back around again until completed.
ALERT: Alerting powerholders of their impact on some identified need of the powerless not satisfied by available means.
ASSESS: Here is where the assessments occur. With or without the AI's participation.
AUDIT: An initial assessment offers a baseline that can be improved upon and then checked again to show improvement from the wellness campaign's support.
AVOW: The campaign renews their commitment to resolve the unchosen needs of all who participated. Those who refused or neglected to participate receive no more than what the law minimally requires.
ASSESS. The first pass from the RI invites the AI to assess if the RI's observable behavior aptly distinguish between
chosen actions
and
unchosen needs.
BE ASSESSED. Then the RI assesses if the AI's known actions aptly distinguishes between
chosen actions
and
unchosen needs.
The next time, each assesses the other to check if each demonstrates a distinction between:
If necessary for a follow-up, each can assess each other's identifiable distinction between:
Each of these can be assessed using what we call a "measurably accountable impacted needs" testable hypothesis. The more of this, then the more of that. A wellness campaign walks each participating AI through this developmental process.
5. Turn AI's responsive reputation into earned legitimacy.
When contacted by a wellness campaign, these assessments of responsiveness get turned into evidence-based legitimacy. This replaces fickle "ascribed legitimacy" with empirically measurable "earned legitimacy".
Ascribed legitimacy: Arbitrary acceptance of authority prone to manipulation and low responsiveness to the needs of those under that authority.
Earned legitimacy: Cultivated acceptance of authority that demonstrates evidence it enables the full resolution of needs of those under that authority.
A wellness campaign provides a microcosm of an authority's scope of influence. The participants in the wellness campaign have already practiced among themselves how to improve responsiveness to needs. They support AI to also improve their measurable responsiveness to needs, to boost their legitimacy.
As powerholders, their responsive ratings get instantly converted to their demonstrated level of earned legitimacy. As long as the AI works with the wellness campaign to address needs, their emerging evidence-based legitimacy is not publicized until after the completion of the campaign. Then the campaign can announce not only their higher level of legitimacy, but how much it improved by engaging closing with this sample of their constituents.
Each level of a responsive reputation mirrors an earned legitimacy level. From causing harm to enabling resolution of identified needs.
Offensive illegitimacy. Powerful influence causing harm upon the relatively less powerful; provoking more needs than helping to resolve needs.
Substandard legitimacy. Powerholders acknowledging there could be needs they impact but only offering to pacify the pain of those underserved needs.
Standard legitimacy. Powerholders demonstrating mutual regard that openly relates to the impacted needs of others as worthy of the same respect as their own needs.
Competitive legitimacy. Powerholders addressing needs more effectively than others to boost own brand as professionally more responsive to their constituents.
Transformative legitimacy. Powerholders addressing needs by transforming current social structures, with inspiring ways to transcend such limits to fully resolve all needs.
Dig a little deeper, and you may find an empirical basis for these graduated levels. The AI may start at the low end. But a wellness campaign provides opportunity to vastly improve their responsiveness to needs so they can earn unparallel heights of trustworthiness.
6. Provide powerholders with constructive feedback.
Need-response starts with the assumption that a powerholder AI intends no harm against any vulnerable RI they impact. Adversarialism too easily presumes selfish motives, bad faith, or ill intent. Some of that is projection.
A wellness campaign stays positive by integrating noble traits like patience, kindness, humility, discipline, mercy, and love. Instead of provoking defensiveness as adversarial systems often do, rapport is maintained by applying these character traits to everybody. We trust this incentivizes greater participation.
Instead of accusing AI powerholders for the disappointing results of their leadership, we relate more closely to the challenges they face. We provide the impact data they seek to inform them how to make better decisions. The kind that can improve their impact on our lives, by enabling us to resolve more of our needs.
We incentivize their honest feedback to our inquiries. We anticipate this sometimes points to their honest admission that they are doing all they can to help us, but facts beyond their control prevent them from doing more.
This points to structural problems. Here is where the wellness campaign supports AI leaders to address structural barriers, such as unresponsive social norms.
7. Transform unresponsive social norms.
Often enough, the powerholder is bound by constraints beyond their personal control. Some of their authority gets divested elsewhere or in others. Need-response identifies at least three types:
Upchain: They are bound by some higher authority.
Sidechain: They share authority with others.
Downchain: They delegate authority to independent subordinates.
These each present as a structural problem. And no longer a power problem.
But we still hold the powerholder accountable. Until they identify and address any barrier holding them back, they are labelled as personally and professionally culpable to hindering resolution of needs
Once the AI powerholder works to address the structural limits, they're no longer held personally culpable but only professionally culpable for hindering resolution of exposed needs.
The wellness campaign then kicks into high gear to help transform offending social barriers complicit to impeding resolution of needs. Those AI leaders who rise to the challenge to effectively alter social structures to be more responsive to our unchosen needs earn the highest level of earned legitimacy: Transformative legitimacy.
Think of how MLK transformed society from tolerating racism to how almost everyone agrees with his call to not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Think of how JFK transformed the Cold War from nuclear brinkmanship to humanizing the other side toward agreeing to the first nuclear test ban treaty.
Now think about who could rise to the challenges facing us today. Who could turn the challenges of avoidant adversarialism rotting our society into opportunities for deeper interpersonal connections? Who can extend MLK's vision to end hate with the power of love?
ENGAGE!
Now it's your turn.
For your own benefit, and for all of those you love, internalize this vision to resolve more needs to solve more problems.
Take your disappointment with lawyers or politicians or psychotherapists to one of these wellness campaigns.
Turn your disillusionment with politics and other failing institutions into opportunities for meaningful growth.
Consider what a wellness campaign can do for you.
Follow one and learn for yourself.
Help grow this vision.
Contact us if you can help us make this a reality. We're just getting started.
Spread some love.
ENGAGE!
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